Young Again
by labyrinths
Summary: Jerry thinks about Amy and his past. Jerry/Amy


**Young Again**

**Hedge Labyrinth**

She makes him feel like that summer day, centuries ago, when he'd sauntered back to the palazzo, sun streaming through the streets, an apple in his pocket and a bawdy tune on his lips.

Then, of course, the attack. The infection. The change.

At first, true to his first calling – his father was a physician, so was he – he searched for answers in science to the problem that had suddenly afflicted him. But science held no answers and though he toiled for a while as a physician, feeding on the sick and the dying, he soon grew weary of this feast of carrion which left him weak and sickly.

He joined the pack of the one who turned him and spent a good three decades with his kind before sauntering off on his own, dissatisfied with life and the others.

#

The girl is golden haired and reminds him of Simonetta Vespucci, who'd been a model for Botticelli. Face of a goddess like he hasn't seen in decades.

Beautiful. Ripe for the taking.

#

He remembered the weight of a sword in his hand and the delicious taste of blood after a good fight. Ah, those days, long gone. Guns took much of the fun out of vampire hunters. What's the art of aiming a rifle? None, whatsoever.

#

He feels her looking at him. A coquettish little smirk, quickly hidden.

He can't help but look, perhaps look a bit too obviously, at her.

#

He'd been a merchant, a forger, and a number of other things. Born to riches but sometimes reduced to begging. Surviving.

Years piled upon years.

He leaned over the finely crafted lenses – the work of Leeuwenhoek – and observed blood under the microscope. Such wonders spread before his eyes. A whole new era was ahead for him. A better one, perhaps.

He'd started a pack of his own.

#

Insolence, innocence and awe. He thinks he was like this, once.

She turns her head.

The firm, determined mouth, closed, unwilling to grant him a kiss until he places his fingertips against the lips.

Ah, the eyes darting and then the mouth yielding, opening for him.

#

Years shuffled like a deck of cards. The Industrial Revolution, the great steam engines which suddenly offered a quickness of transportation as yet unforeseen.

The cities swelled more than before, bursting at the seams with faceless, nameless poor offering themselves like a banquet for his kind.

Such fun, back then.

The joys of Paris and London, of painting the town red with blood and tasting absinthe in the veins of a poor, unfortunate victim.

His pack of several years was killed in 1894. He knew the drill. He's survived other times – many times – before.

He watched the flickering images on a white screen and, suddenly bored with Europe, suddenly needing more thrills, suddenly wishing to escape the buildings he knew, the weight of history; dashed to America.

#

The briefest hesitation and then she kisses him back.

It's not mesmerism. No parlour tricks. She wants him and he wants her.

He runs his hands through her flaxen hair, kisses the soft curve of the neck.

#

The roar of the 20s suited him. He grew coarser, more brazen. The Great Depression rolled in and his pack found easy prey on the destitute tumbling down dusty roads. Then the 60s – it was easy to travel together, to pass off as another eccentric commune – and the 80s when he'd gone back to Europe once America had lost its lustre, decayed and grown grey.

He was bored, irritated.

He visited the Louvre and gazed at "The Astronomer" and thought how no one nowadays could remember the colour of Vermeer's eyes.

He felt old, his black leather jacket chaffing against his skin.

He wanted … something. He did not know what he wanted.

The new millennium, perhaps, might prove better.

But wasn't that what he always told himself?

#

She stirs something in him. Something old, buried under layers of earth.

He presses a hand against the small of her back, idly.

What is this feeling?

He looks at her, at the large eyes and the half-smile.

She makes him feel young again.

She makes him feel like that summer day, centuries ago, when he'd sauntered back to the palazzo, sun streaming through the streets, an apple in his pocket and a bawdy tune on his lips.

THE END


End file.
